I wound up with a 4 yr old in my bed this morning. He found his way there sometime after 5 AM, after my wife left for work. The others were still asleep. They woke after six to do their morning work and then wander downstairs for some Beyblade play. Once the first Bey spun into the stadium the kids knew they needed to find me. See, we connect with Beyblade and the other distractions that help them remain young. When I was a kid fun meant going outside on my bike or diagramming make-believe wars with a handful of lightbulb-melted G.I.Joe’s and a Hulk Hogan doll, or maybe lining up a dozen Topps cards in the positions of a baseball diamond and teeing off a wadded up ball of tissue.
Yeah, I was a lonely kid.
My children have a dramatically different existence. They battle zombies and beg for turns on Halo and Call of Duty. They navigate laptops, cell phones, kindles, and ipads with the familiarity of an engineer. When money hits their hands they run out to the store and buy a pack of Pokemon cards, not to play pretend baseball with, but to trade with other classmates and to lord over their brothers with the awesomeness of their pokemon decks. Sometimes we even play pokemon together, just as we play Beyblade together and I can, for those moments, be a kid again myself and languish and love everything about the genuine friendship and camaraderie formed in childhood.
Being a dad can be like being a kid for me. I want to climb down into their imaginations and understand how different their childhood is from my own while I enjoy observing that childhood and trying to be a part of it in any way I can.